I follow mortgage-backed securities litigation closely enough to be disgusted at the greed that fueled the securitization of insufficiently underwritten mortgages issued to homeowners who had no hope of paying them off. Sure, MBS investors and the bond insurers that backed MBS trusts were sophisticated and, to some extent, forewarned about the timebombs lurking in those mortgage pools. But you can’t read the voluminous MBS filings by monolines and investors — including the federal agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — without wishing that someone be held accountable for sending the housing market on a slide, and dragging down the rest of the economy with it.

To date, accountability has been an elusive goal. I’m not talking about private suits or breach-of-contract put-back claims, in which MBS issuers are beginning to acknowledge billions of dollars of exposure to investors and insurers. But state and federal regulators and prosecutors have lagged behind the private plaintiffs bar (and the Federal Housing Finance Agency). As best I can tell, there have been no criminal prosecutions of people or institutions involved in mortgage-backed securitizations. On the civil side, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, brought an MBS-based suit against Deutsche Bank last May. This summer, the New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, filed Martin Act claims against Bank of New York Mellon for its conduct as Countrywide MBS securitization trustee. In October, the Delaware AG, Joseph Biden III, filed a civil suit against the Mortgage Electronic Registry System that accuses the banks that established MERS of using it as a vehicle to bundle mortgages they didn’t actually own. And last week, the Illinois AG, Lisa Madigan, sued Standard & Poor‘s for giving undeserved AAA ratings to overly risky mortgage-backed notes.